This study investigates the structural, semantic, and cognitive foundations of phraseological units expressing emotions in English and Uzbek. Emotional idioms are analyzed as complex linguistic, psychological, and cultural phenomena shaped by universal embodied experience and culturally specific symbolic models. Drawing on Wundt’s emotional dimensions , Anokhin’s motivational theory , Simonov’s informational theory , Reykovsky’s evaluative psychology , Izard’s discrete emotion theory , and modern cognitive linguistic insights into conceptual metaphor and metonymy, the article demonstrates that emotional idioms are not arbitrary but systematically motivated. Universal conceptual metaphors—such as “anger is heat,” “happiness is up,” “sadness is down,” and “fear is cold”—appear in both languages, while culture-specific models differentiate English color-based metaphors from Uzbek heart-centered metaphors. The findings enrich contrastive linguistics, translation studies, and intercultural communication by revealing how emotional cognition is encoded through multi-layered phraseological systems.

emotional phraseology, semantics, structure, metaphor, metonymy, intensity, cognitive model, cultural connotation.

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Izard, C. E. (1977). Human emotions. New York: Plenum Press.

Reykovsky, Y. (1970). Experimental psychology of emotions. Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers.

Simonov, P. V. (1970). The emotional brain: Physiology of emotions. Moscow: Nauka.

Wundt, W. (1896). Grundriss der Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann.